Perla, the lab’s very first UCI undergrad researcher, is going to be starting a PhD in Microbiology at UC Davis this fall! Way to go Perla, we’re proud of you!

A project led by Annika Nelson (former postdoc, now Assistant Professor at TCU) was recently accepted for publication! Link here.

Also, Nickole was accepted into the prestigious Molecular Evolution workshop at the Marine Biological Lab!

Lots of good things have happened since the last update…here is a long-overdue list!

• Former postdoc Annika Nelson started as an Assistant Professor at TCU. Check out her lab website!
• Jen received a grant from the California Native Plant Society to fund her bee research
• Nickole received the Miguel Velez Scholarship from UCI, as well as a Best Early Career Researcher Poster award at ISME
• Former undergrad Perla Vazquez participated in a post-bac summer research program at the University of Georgia and is applying to grad schools
• Former undergrad Alejandro Vazquez conducted honeybee field research in North Dakota with the USGS
• I received a two-year grant from USDA to develop probiotics for bumble bees
• A couple new papers/preprints are now live
• UCI undergrad Aidan Lee is joining the lab this fall. Welcome Aidan!

Our work was featured in KCRW’s “Greater LA” program! Check it out here: https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/insects/bees

Congrats to Nickole on her paper characterizing gut microbiomes for the first time in Neotropical bumble bees! Check it out: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/msphere.00139-23

Kristal and I had a blast collecting bumble bees in the Eastern Sierra and White Mountains last week. Special thanks to Erica Pitcavage for field assistance and staff at the SNARL and WMRS research stations (especially Tim).

Summer is still in full swing, and we’re busy collecting bees in the field, doing experiments, analyzing data, and writing! Some news:

• My new opinion article on “evolutionary addiction” was just published in Trends in Microbiology.
• Dr. Bahareh Sorouri, a postdoc at UA Fairbanks, is joining the lab as a Visiting Scientist. Welcome Bahareh!
• I did an interview with the UCI communications office about the work going on in the lab: video and article

Lots of good news to report from the Hammer lab lately!

• Nickole and Jen did great on their first committee meetings
• Jen received a grant from the Audubon Society to fund her bee research
• Sophia was accepted into a bunch of PhD programs and is going to Cornell in the fall
• We received a grant from the Joint Genome Institute to do metagenomic sequencing of wild bumble bees
• Toby’s paper on bee micro-breweries got some press (here and here)

We’ve got a lot of field work and lab work happening now and a couple of papers (hopefully) coming out this summer, stay tuned!

A new paper on cellophane bee “micro-breweries”, by Toby and collaborators, was just published. Check it out here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2023.1114849/full!

Annika was awarded a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture! She’ll be leveraging her expertise in community ecology to design and test probiotic gut bacterial communities for bumble bees. Congrats Annika!